When a character in Wallace Shawn’s 1985
play asked to be called Miss Cat, I saw a couple of colleagues exchange
here-we-go-again looks. In fact, this piece bears little resemblance to
the same author’s protracted kitty-fiddling riff Grasses Of A Thousand Colours
currently playing upstairs at the Court… heavens, it even includes
longish segments in which characters speak to each other onstage. It
does, however, share a fundamental attitude: a profound ambivalence
towards his native New York intellectual set. Aunt Dan And Lemon may be set in
England, but it is indistinguishable from Shawn’s usual dramatic NYC
socially, or even lexically – it features a London in which people live
“on the South Side”.

Almost all of Shawn’s plays contain indictments of what he sees as the
solipsism and social detachment of this stratum; some (including Grasses) visit upon them an
implicitly deserved apocalypse of one kind or another. But whether
intentionally or not, Shawn usually ends up showing a kind of
admiration of the Nietzschean purity of will embodied in such
selfishness. It is not unlike the canard of yore, “Love her or hate
her, you’ve got to admire Thatcher’s conviction.” Here, too, the
central emblem of the loathed value system is cripplingly dated. What
feels like half an hour of the 110-minute playing time is devoted to
Aunt Dan’s increasingly fervent championing of Henry Kissinger’s
Vietnam policy; already a decade old when the play premièred, it
now – notwithstanding more recent echoes in the Iraq venture – feels
like a curio.

Dominic Cooke’s production is good on feeling, on texture. Scenes flow
into each other without demarcation, and characters do not so much
enter and exit as simply seem to materialise in the stream of Lemon’s
reminiscences of her childhood and the stories told her by “Aunt” Dan
of her friends. Lorraine
Ashbourne as Dan never quite scintillates enough to explain Lemon’s
fascination with her, although she is undoubtedly a powerful presence.
Paul Chahidi is an unforgiving figure as Lemon’s American father, and
Scarlett Johnson (who could build a career out of typographical errors)
is both alluring and heartless as a siren from Dan’s recollections.
Jane Horrocks has little to do as Lemon except bookend the memory
sequence with remarks on the dedication of the Nazis to realising their
own value system – that authorial ambivalence at its most naked. But,
as Nietzsche remarked, if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes
into you.